The Proposals and Notes of Some Russian and Foreign Scientists and Researchers
Devoted to the Improvement of The System of Publication and Estimation of Scientific Papers.


The Author Data
The Author's Proposals
Alexander Shagaev (Russia) and Juan R. Gonzalez-Alvarez (Spain) Notes, concerned with these Proposals
Morozov
Russia
It is need power integrated search system ….  It is need the division of information on the sections, when one same paper can be contained (when it is necessary) in some different sections at the same time (although the server will contain only one version of this paper)….  
Alexander Shagaev - "I completely agree with this point of view."
Juan R. Gonzalez-Alvarez - "Excellent remark. In Can. Sci. Rep. we avoided the generation of traditional databases or the archival according to pre-defined sections, disciplines, packs, or keywords, because this would limit the access to information for cases as those you report.
We generate the works in standard format and leave third-party search engines to index them. Previously, three engines was available to our readers; but this year, two were eliminated and the more popular and efficient (fastest and deepest indexing of new available information) maintained. You can search info by your own keybords, phrases, by references cited, etc. because the engine database indexes the full content instead only the abstract or only a pre-defined number of keybords typed by librarians. The system is still in development, but actually it is already possible to search pages containing some simple equations and (I have not checked this) it would even be possible to perform some simple searchs by figures."
Abolin Oleg Eduardovich
Job Organization: Public Corporation "Chemical-Metallurgical Plan"
Scientific Degree: Candidate of Chemical Science;
Job Position: Engineer - Methodologist
I'd like, also, to offer to make a database, containing information about different rejected (by different publishers) papers (the reasons of rejection, editors names, time of papers submission, author-editor correspondence, papers texts).
Alexander Shagaev - "It is possible, but it have meaning for separated  scientific fields only, because the visitors of such site must be specialists in this scientific field. It is impossible for our project now, because it direct our discussion vector at other direction (was a paper author/reviewer right or not)."
Juan R. Gonzalez-Alvarez - "I also agree. I have proposed that rejected papers would be archived in some common website driven by scientific organizations or similar. The indexing of this site would be done by the same search-engines that index the accepted papers. This mean that you can search among the rejected papers by editor names, reviewer names, keybords, time and date of submission, etc. We propose reviewers reports to be published in an appendix of the paper reviewed. Anyone accessing the rejected paper can see the reasons for rejection."
Erik S. Brown
Country: USA
Organization: Argenta LLC
Job Position: Director
Scientific Degree: B.A. Chemistry
My feeling is the only way to begin a new process of publishing is to have a few recognized web sites to publish and archive new papers.  Possibly, your site should index the 'most visited' papers.  Since the most important work would get referenced in new papers, then we could assume that the most 'visited' papers would be a way to 'rank' papers that avoids the pier review problem. It will only be when 'important' publications are found on such websites (or blogs as you suggest) that we would overcome the pier review problem of major publications
Alexander Shagaev - "It is necessary to force official scientific organizations to consider such Internet papers (that were not reviewed by usual journal's reviewers, but were published in Internet and have high rank between colleagues) as scientific papers."
Juan R. Gonzalez-Alvarez - "All papers, popular or not, are indexed. We had a section in our website indexing the five most popular reports by number of downloads, but was eliminated just this year.
In our experience, popularity is a very subjective index. For instance, Onsager revolutionary works were not popular and almost not cited when published, but several decades after he received a Nobel Prize for Chemistry by them. Yes, now they are rather cited and popular, but my point is that the objective quality of his paper is the same today that when published, independently of their respective popularity and perceived subjective quality. The key is that not all the readers are experts in a topic, and the opinion of a reader who is just learning a subject cannot be as trusted as the opinion by an expert. Moreover, you can download a paper, read it, and then disagree with the author findings, which invalidates the objectivity of a "most visited papers" index. Also papers on broader and older disciplines, with more members/readers, tend to be more popular than papers on specialized and novel disciplines with less members/readers. Ranking papers by popularity or number of downloads would distort the quality of papers and would favour more mainstream papers over revolutionary papers."
Polianskiy Vladimir Nikolaevich
Country: Russia
Organization:
Job Position: former plant engineer, a pensioner now.
Scientific Degree: no
I think that the development of forums is most effective your proposal. We must act just now by means of the cooperation with the Russian State Duma and obtain more high status for forums (in Russia). The low about status of public scientific forums is necessary.
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My first proposal is devoted to the procedure of the collection of reviewers estimations.
It is the table containing 5 columns.
1, 3, 4 and 5-th columns must be narrow (for numbers), but the second column must be wide.
The second column must contain different variants of estimation of a scientific paper.
For example, the following text can be set at the first line - "The paper pretend to principal change of the generally accepted theory ".
The next line, that rank is smaller, can contain the following text - "The paper pretend to the elimination of defects of the existent theory".
And so on.
The last line can have the following form - "The paper don't contain principal differences from the existent technical solutions".
The paper author must mark (by means of any symbol) such line (at the first column) that characterize (on his/her view) his/her paper quality.
The 3-rd column must contain estimations (1 estimation = 1 person) of the registered public reviewers. They can be people which have different specialities.
The 4 column must contain estimations of the registered professional reviewers.
The 5 column must contain estimations of the registered members of jury (it maybe that it will be High Certification Commission members). The example of such Table is illustrated here.
The voting of all these 3 groups must be secret, but any reviewer can show his/her notes (devoted to the paper), give advices and recommends although he/shi is secret by login. The author must include corresponding information (reviewers notes) in the paper in such case.
The voting of these groups of reviewers must be conducted by turn and must be separated in the time, to give author the time to understand criticism and to edit paper or prove its (criticism) groundlessness.
===========================================================I think that the following appeal (to author) must be located before the table:
Author - you must remember that:
1. A new idea arise, at the first, in only one head on all terrestial globe. Thus, you must be ready to the fact that other people don't understand you. You task is - to overcome this misunderstanding.
2. You are not Got.  Only Got know your idea better then you. So, be considerate towards other people views.  They want know this truth also and everyone from them go to this truth by his/her own way, stated by Got.
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Alexander Shagaev must make a conceptual design of the project (as a practical step of the beginning initiative) and repeatedly to make a request to the Russian president Putin. It is necessary to obtain the financing for the project approbation. It will be good if Juan will make corresponding request to the Spanish King also.
Alexander Shagaev - "I completely agree with this point of view."



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I don't have anything against such review list if it will be used by every specialist reading a scientific paper in Internet. I can agree with this proposal, also, if rejected paper is transferred to the folder "Rejected Papers" (if the paper author don't agree with reviewers estimation),  but not is removed from the journal site. However, I categorically can't agree with the following form of proposal "The voting of all these 3 groups must be secret, but any reviewer can show his/her notes (devoted to the paper), give advices and recommends although he/shi is secret by login.", because it may result in simple rejection of a paper (without any explanation of this decision). Any negative note must be accompanied by the detail explanation of this decision. The paper author must have possibility to defend his/her point of view.

















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I (and I hope Juan) will try do it, but we need wide active support of scientific community.

Juan R. Gonzalez-Alvarez - "We disagree with standarized reviewers forms and with simple table-like or ranking-like forms. Standarized texts as your "first line", "last line", etc. are not always applicable to the paper under review. We think that reviewers would write their reviews as if were ordinary comments on papers. Reviewers can do detailed criticism from presentation style and language to the adequacy of set of references cited through technical details of the body of the paper. Reviewers can adapt their comment to each paper that they review. Readers prefer to know both the details of a review and the author's response to criticism rather than a simple number/rank or similar in a table. Number/ranks, popularity indices and the like are subjective elements invented by burocreats to analize stuff beyond their comprehension.
We consider three possibilities for a reviewed paper: accept it, reject it, or accept it with modifications. Published papers are those with mayority of acceptations. Humans are not error-free and aceptance does not mean that a published paper was completely correct. Therefore, we have introduced a second peer-review process, which is done after publications and for all the life of the paper. Anyone can write a review of the paper and submit it. Authors are obligated to study reviews and adapt/update/change their published papers. Authors can also prepare a new improved version of the paper even if received no review. Science advances and authors must adapt their papers to new knowledge, new experiments, etc. We call this model a "living journal".
We think that anonymous votation is an open door to abuses from anonimity. Many of our colleagues, including renowned Nobel Winners as Julian S. Schwinger agree: "The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science." Tom Abate wrote: "Reviewers often work anonymously, giving them greater opportunity to act arbitrarily." I have given abundant details about how anonimity is actually being used for censorship. Sceptionally, high-quality anonymous reviews would be permitted, but authors always have the possibility to reject anonymous reviews.
Finally, I would like to do requests to Spanish president Zapatero —Spanish King Juan Carlos is only military chief—. However, I completely agree with Alexander. I think that it is necessary to write first a public online manifesto with the ideas of all of us for the change; this manifesto would be signed by all the people who agree. Only when the number of signatures was large enough, we could think to contact with presidents."
Parfenov Vladimir Alexandrovich
Country: Russia
Organization: Institute of Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Siberian Department Of Russian Academy of Sciences (Krasnoyarsk).
Job Position: junior scientific worker, post-graduate student.
Scientific Degree: no
I'd like to propose to send a submitted paper (with additional letter of credence, containing the corresponding points of view of forum members) to the publisher after 2-3 month discussion. It is necessary to force journal reviewers to take into account these points of view during making their (reviewer) decisions about paper publication or forced them to base any their decision. Papers published at the journals maybe described as complete scientific papers. Paper that was transferred (at the forums) at the folder "accepted" must be described as thesis or report.
Alexander Shagaev - "I can agree with this point of view only in small part, because the author of this proposal give the right of the final decision to the hands of very small group that can make incorrect resolve . Such possibility is very big in such cases."
Juan R. Gonzalez-Alvarez - "We think that submitting a letter is an interesting idea, but it would not solve all the difficulties reported in "Science in the 21st century: social, political, and economic issues". I do not understand your attempt to do a difference between "complete scientific papers" at the one hand and "thesis" and "reports" in the other. In my work "Science in the 21st century: social, political, and economic issues" I cited the case of Frank MacFarlane Burnet, whose work was rejected by journals and he finally published it as a book. The discovery reported in the second edition of the book was awarded with a share of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. His unrefereed book would not match your idea of "complete scientific papers", however the objective scientific validity of the material contained in his book was very superior to most of those."
Dzver - unknown member of the forum on the Russian scientific site Membrana
The task of the identification of PC user can't be solved in reality on 100%, because it is impossible to take his/her fingerprint evidence.
It is possible to do like in Paypal to identify user with high probability. The user registration pass in 2 steps. The user start his/her registration by input of his/her full name, address and other details on the registration page. A usual post letter (not email), containing confirmatory cod is sended to him/her then. The user confirms his/her registration when he/shi input this confirmatory cod.  
Practically it is mean only that fact that a person which started registration "see" this physical address. However it is enough to guarantee user's information on 99.99999% and to solve problem of clones.
It is possible to set user's rank on the basis of additional information. For example, on the basis of his/her papers, references to his/her papers and so on (all this information must be confirmed). It is the basis of the weight/authority of his/her vote (paper estimation) for the papers published at the site.
The user rank maybe made with "saturability", for example as type 1/(1+1/x) in order to limit it for single user. It is possible to control of new users (whose send additional information to increase their ranks) by means of 5 existent random high rank users (specialists working in this field) which receive new user information (for confirmation).
The real full names is necessary, because existent people (specialists) will guarantee the registration method. It isn't necessity to publish their real addresses, because they will be stored at the "journal editor's office ".  
The review process must be public. The paper is estimated by users (specialists) on the basis of their ranks in the corresponding scientific field.
It is possible to devise so much, but there is the following question:
It is necessary to fund this project, because the real people (watching for the realization of these rules) will do real work. This project will not work by "himself", although it is possible to decrease the financial charges.
The papers published in accordance with this system will have enough rank if the system is enough right and if it will be enough developed at the beginning (it is most hard part of the task) (if will be published papers of normal, but not mad scientists on the basis of this idea). At least (if this system will be not officially established) scientists will read the papers published in it (like in lanl). 
By the way, it is possible "co-operate" with lanl, because selected papers of well-known scientists can be automatically copied to this system site and estimated here. In this case the authors of this papers will visit this system site to see the points of view of their colleagues.
Alexander Shagaev - "These proposals are very interesting and maybe useful in future system. I'd like to recommend all scientists to take them (these proposals) into consideration. I think that we must to think about them very carefully."
Juan R. Gonzalez-Alvarez - "I agree that we cannot guarantize 100% the identity on Internet. I am also aware that we cannot do it in real life. National identity documents, passports, and similar identification documents are also falsified in real life and it is a police task to detect the falsifications and to get the real identity of people –sometimes even fingerprints are falsified!–.
I am not an expert on this but I think that ordinary mail only confirms the existence of a physical address, but not the real identity of the user/reader associated to that address. In Spain one can rent mail boxes. I suppose this renting is also possible in other countries. I cannot think of some alternative method to your proposals, maybe others can help us at this point."
Viktor Koldun
How about my question devoted a working device? Or you don't sink lower of General Everything Theory???
Alexander Shagaev - "I completely agree with this point of view. Any working device or computer program  (developed by the scientist or researcher) must be considered as full value scientific work."






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